We look up to doctors. We care about what they think. We seek their advice. We follow their direction. When they say something hurtful, it can really strike at the heart of how we feel about ourselves. You’d think that in this day and age medical professionals would know how to handle women who have perinatal mood and anxiety disorders with care, but the truth is that many don’t. I hear from moms all the time who are told awful, ignorantor destructive things.
I’ve written about this in the past. About the nurse who told the mom who had PPD and needed to see her doctor to just take a hot bath. The people who tell moms who are 4 months postpartum that the baby is too old for her to have PPD. The medical practicesthat completely blow the entire process ofcaring fora mother who is suffering. It makes me want to hunt these people down and box their ears.
With increasing frequency, postpartum women who have taken antidepressants during pregnancy have shared – usually in tears – that while in the hospital for their labor and delivery hospitalization, a health care provider at the hospital said something judgmental about their being on an antidepressant. For example, one woman said that a nurse told her, “I can’t believe you took that during pregnancy.” Or, “Don’t you know how risky that is?!” Or “How could you do that to your baby?” This is often in the context of women using other medications in parallel for non-psychiatric indications, of which less may be known about the reproductive safety profile, but are not addressed by the health care provider.
She goes on to write about how to deal with uninformed comments about PPD from doctors and nurses, offeringgreat advice that I think you’ll want to see. Hope you’ll check it out!
Some people are really that judgmental about others suffering eh. Well that's the nature of so many people.Anyway there are also health care provider who are supportive to pregnant mothers who are suffering depression.
Thank you so much for this post. It never ceases to amaze me how inconsiderate and insensitive people are when it comes to mothers, period. This post reminds me that, while there are "health care provider(s) who are supportive", the work continues to be necessary in the fight to educate others about PPD. I know that the point of the post was not to denounce those who do show support, but to shed light on how professionals can be unsupportive and lack empathy where they most likely should show the opposite.
yeah a lot of people are very inconsiderate , not knowing the pain they caused to someone… I felt sorry for those people who have undergo such thing, your post is an eye opener for us mothers who shares the same interest
Thank you for posting this! When I reached out for help I didn't have a traumatic experience per se, but it definitely felt like my doctor didn't care. I went to my 6 week post-partum visit and told the doctor I was having scary thoughts about hurting my baby and I couldn't stop crying, and without even looking at me he pulled out his pad and wrote me a prescription for anti-depressants. It did end up helping me a little bit, but I felt so let down that he didn't even take a few minutes to talk with me.